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North Pole Promise

Program Description

North Pole Promise is a timeless story of two American explorers and their secret legacy left behind at the North Pole 100 years ago. Admiral Robert E. Peary, and his associate Matthew Henson both fathered sons with Greenlandic Inuit (Eskimo) women during their attempts to reach the North Pole in 1906. Peary and Henson last saw their young sons as 3-year-olds in 1909, after they successfully reached the North Pole and left Greenland never to return.

The boys played as childhood friends but circumstances separated them for decades. This film documents their reunion and addresses the inequity of how history remembers the two explorers. Peary was white. Henson was black.

Harvard Neurology Professor Dr. S. Allen Counter arranged for the two men to meet and, in a centennial celebration of the North Pole discovery, placed a capsule at the top of the earth that honors the Inuit descendants of both explorers.